Creature Kitchen is a great fun cosy/horror cooking simulator. In this one, it’s your job to make friends with animals and feed them their favourite food. All to the tune of a cabin in the woods spooky type deal.
The game is by indie dev The Rat Zone (who runs a gloriously retro 90s style website). It’s a cheap one (£5), yet offers several hours of gameplay with lots of charming guffawing to be had. We love it!
TREMBLE in Horror (and cook food) in Creature Kitchen
This game launched in February 2026 and has had rave reviews on Steam.
The closest game we can think to this one is Metroidvania classic Animal Well (2024). It doesn’t have any cooking in it, but there’s the same animal-based creepy horror vibe. Plus, it isn’t at all scary (it just maintains a joke horror façade about it) as all the animals you meet are friendly.
Creature Kitchen is entirely its own thing, though, with lots of low-fi graphical cooking and exploration.
The whole THRUST of the game is to wander around in a creepy forest (where you love in a cabin), meet cute animals, source ingredients, and make your new animal friends food. Here it is in action.
With around two hours of gameplay, Creature Kitchen never outstays its welcome. It’s just a fun, pick up and play blast you can have fun with one morning, afternoon, or evening. It’s all just very chilled out.
In an amusing blog post on The Rat Zone site (So uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh) from the 25th February, the devs noted this:
“We just want to reiterate that the reception to our funny animal game and the new influx of RAT FOLLOWERS has exceeded our wildest expectations. We started this collective 3(wow) years ago mainly as an outlet for a group of friends to hang out and create things together, and i guess we never expected our stuff to resonate with so so many of you. For now this is still technically a side gig for all of us, but your collective psionic energy will motivate us to make 1000 GAMEs. And each will be terrible/bad in a completely unique way!!”
It’s all part of the reason why we love indie games. We’re not sure who The Rat Zone is and who’s behind it all as the team has kept things secret. But what was supposed to just be a bit of fun for them has blown up with the game being a cult hit.
Which is fantabulous. It may only be two hours long, but Creature Kitchen is chilled out fun and we had a blast with it. Innit.
Creature Kitchen’s Lovely Little Soundtrack
The Rat Zone has kindly made the game’s great soundtrack available for free online. The music is by a whole bunch of artists. If you’re on Steam, you can download it all there (Creature Kitchen Soundtrack).
Someone called “ashfyre” is listed as the artist, but other mentions for pieces include:
- The Daydreamer by Session 0
- Really Bad by ‘AbsoluteGoob’
- Trapped by Caleb Klomparens
- Creature Hotline by Caleb Klomparens
- Feed the Creatures by ‘CocoaBeanz’
- The M.i.C – Instrumental by ‘Spikemasc’
- Snaps and Claps by Wesley Lippard
The result is chilled out ambience with all sorts of different genres. But we do like these relaxed guitar focussed ones the most.
All the pieces are very short, most don’t last for more than a minute. But it’s good stuff and adds a lot of relevant atmosphere to what is a unique, very enjoyable gaming experience.
